Greenspan tries to rewrite history

In an article titled "The Born Prophecy," published in the May, 2009 American Bar Association Journal, Richard Schmitt writes about a 1996 conversation between Brooksley E. Born (shortly after she was named to head the Commodity Futures Trading Commission) and Alan Greenspan, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve.

The influential Greenspan was an ardent proponent of unfettered markets. Born was a powerful Washington, DC lawyer with a track record for activist causes. Over lunch in his private dining room at the stately headquarters of the Fed in Washington, Greenspan probed their differences.

Well, Brooksley, I guess you and I will never agree about fraud," Born, in a recent interview, remembers Greenspan saying.

"What is there not to agree on?" Born says she replied.

"Well, you probably will always believe that there should be laws against fraud, and I don't think there is any need for a law against fraud," she recalls him saying. Greenspan, Born says, believed the market would take care of itself.

Further down in this same article Schmidt notes that, according to Greenspan, Born has mischaracterized the conversation and that the alleged conversation is "wholly at variance with my decades-long-held view." Actions speak louder than words, of course, proving that Greenspan is largely responsible for ruining the economy of the United States, and that he is lying to attempt to deny a conversation that is wholly consistent with his lack of interest in regulating financial institutions during his tenure at the Fed. Eliot Spitzer, recently appearing with Arianna Huffington on CNBC, makes one strong point after another. Stress test the banks now, he asks? Shouldn't they have been monitoring the banks all along? It's as if a doctor who, after ten years under your care, and after you've suffered a heart attack, finally decides to take a blood test. What the hell has he been doing for ten years, given that he wasn't doing anything meaningful to monitor your health. According to Spitzer (see the ten-minute video here), Greenspan's approach was absolutely destructive to the life savings of middle class tax payers, who are now in the process of subsidizing the big banks "who are burning our money." He points out that not one CEO of a bank has been removed. To the extent that some of the banks look OK at the moment, it's only because the federal government recently handed them a trillion dollars; "the Fed is sliding the money to the banks" through a "flim-flam game." That's the money they are burning through. He sees more financial crises to come, because we haven't made any significant changes to the system. "We have leveraged the future of our kids." He seriously doubts that the bank "stress tests" are real. Rather, he suspects that they are based on fantasy numbers relating to jobs and debt. He further points out that the Fed is run by the CEO's of the very banks that got us into trouble. Spitzer refers listeners to an article he recently wrote for Slate. The questions focus on whether we should trust the Fed, especially the New York Fed:
Given the power of the N.Y. Fed, it is time to ask some very hard questions about its recent performance. The first question to ask is: Who is the New York Fed? Who exactly has been running the show? Yes, we all know that Tim Geithner was the president and CEO of the N.Y. Fed from 2003 until his ascension as treasury secretary. But who chose him for that position, and to whom did he report? The N.Y. Fed president reports to, and is chosen by, the Fed board of directors.
Huffington points out that the money we're dealing with now is taxpayer money and that it makes the Enron problem look minuscule. Economist Robert Shiller (see the separate video) also suggest that the stress tests are not really about objective data, but they are about "animal spirits." They are attempts to make the American investors feel confident.

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Growing opposition to Obama’s Tax Haven clampdown

Opposition to President Obama's plans to close the fiscal loophole of Tax Haven's is under increasing pressure from business, lobbyists, and the media. You can be sure many Senators and Congressmen, worried about their campaign contributions in the run up to 2010, will be conveying this sense of alarm to the President. Bloomberg ran with a story this morning, quoting some very influential Democrats including Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, Representative Joseph Crowley, a Democrat on the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, and Senator Barbara Boxer. This latest attack follows a lot of negative, primarily republican generated, commentary since last Monday, including the expected outrage from the Republican caucus and their media friends (particularly Fox). One of the most telling, however, was a seemingly innocent comment from CNBC's Erin Burnett, during an interview on Morning Joe last week. She basically said that 'avoiding taxes' is a perfectly acceptable and legal practice and is basically the fault of our 35% corporate tax rate. To Ms Burnett, and all of the other people who think that tax avoidance is perfectly acceptable, I'll share another quote that I discovered while following this story - posted on a discussion thread

"My Lords, of recent years much ingenuity has been expended in certain quarters in attempting to devise methods of disposition of income by which those who were prepared to adopt them might enjoy the benefits of residence within this country while receiving the equivalent of such income without sharing in the appropriate burden of British taxation. Judicial dicta may be cited which may point out that, however elaborate and artificial such methods may be, those who adopt them are "entitled" to do so. There is, of course, no doubt they are within their legal rights, but that is no reason why their effort, or those of the professional gentlemen who assist them in the matter, should be regarded as a commendable exercise of ingenuity or as a discharge of the duties of good citizenship."

Lord Simon, L.C., Latilla v Inland Revenue Commissioners (1943)
Video and more details after the fold

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Why it matters that humans are animals.

I have written numerous posts advocating that because humans are animals they should be recognized as such (for example, see here , here, here , and here). For zoologists and others who study animals, it is obviously true that we are animals. We do hundreds of things that the other mammals do, plus a few extra. You can see it every day when you eat, breathe, emote, poop, become fatigued and fall asleep. Yet millions of Americans are horrified by the thought that human beings are animals. Consider that we aren’t simply animals. Our species is a carefully defined type of animal. We are apes. Frans de Waal explains:

Darwin wasn't just provocative in saying that we descend from the apes—he didn't go far enough . . . We are apes in every way, from our long arms and tailless bodies to our habits and temperament.

If you want even more detail on what type of animal humans are (we are in the ape sub-division of primates), watch this brisk video by Aron-ra. Again, this sort of information is really disturbing to many people, especially religious conservatives. So why don't I simply leave religious conservatives alone? Why do I persist on standing on rooftops and proclaiming this message that humans are animals? Why don't I just whisper this sort of information only to my closest of friends: "Pssst. Human beings are animals." Why don't I just let it be, and keep it all to myself? What could possibly be at stake that I feel compelled to spread the word that human beings are animals? I was in the process of assembling my own list when I just happened to read Chapter 12 of Mark Johnson's new book, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding. Johnson is well known for his work with metaphors and embodied cognition with George Lakoff. Chapter 12 of his new book contains a section that leaped out at me: "The Philosophical Implications of the Embodied Mind." In that short section, Johnson sets forth nine reasons why it really and truly matters for people to acknowledge that they are animals and to fully accept that their minds are embodied, not free-floating entities independent of physical laws. Johnson's biggest target is the "objectivist theory of meaning," the idea that meaning "gets defined without any connection to the experience of the creature (i.e., the human) for whom the words are meaningful. Johnson points out that those who follow the objectivist theory of meaning believe that words and sentences somehow "carry" meaning without even trying to explain how words and sentences ever come to acquire meaning. It should send up immediate red flags that the predominate theory of meaning relies on floating thoughts, a theory of meaning that is not biologically anchored. Reacting to (and rejecting) this objectivist approach, Mark Johnson premises his analysis "with a mind that is not separate from or out-of-ongoing-contact with its body and its world." His worldview includes a specific definition of body and his impressive list of why it matters for human beings to take seriously "the embodiment of mind and meaning." Here are those reasons (I will be borrowing liberally from Johnson's book with these descriptions, beginning at page 279):

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Should you ever talk to the police to exonerate yourself?

Should you ever talk to the police to exonerate yourself? Professor James Duane explains why you should never talk to the police. Ever. Even if you are completely innocent. Sounds like good advice to me. It's not just a clever defense lawyer tactic. It's a Constitutional right that has been upheld repeatedly by the U.S. Supreme Court.

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New scientific center to study altruism

Consider the mission statement of CCare:

[T]he Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, is an innovative initiative of the Stanford School of Medicine within the Stanford Institute for Neuro-Innovation and Translational Neurosciences that will employ the highest standards of scientific inquiry to investigate compassion and altruism.

The Center will draw on many disciplines (including psychology, neuroscience, economics and contemplative traditions, including Buddhism) in order to

To explore ways in which compassion and altruism can be cultivated within an individual as well as within the society on the basis of testable cognitive and affective training exercises.

The center will be run by James Doty, a physician who is also a professor of neuroscience at Stanford. According to a recent article in Science (April 24, 2009, p. 458), the Dalai Lama provided $150,000 of the start-up funding. Unknown to many, the Dalai Lama has long has a keen interest in cognitive science. According to the article in Science, the aim of the Center seems to be finding that part of at least one religious tradition that actually works to make people compassionate:

[t]o take a centuries-old religious practice and extract from it a set of mental exercises with no religious overtones that can be scientifically proven to change the way people treat each other.

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